LSTM Autoencoder problems - python

TLDR:
Autoencoder underfits timeseries reconstruction and just predicts average value.
Question Set-up:
Here is a summary of my attempt at a sequence-to-sequence autoencoder. This image was taken from this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.00148.pdf
Encoder: Standard LSTM layer. Input sequence is encoded in the final hidden state.
Decoder: LSTM Cell (I think!). Reconstruct the sequence one element at a time, starting with the last element x[N].
Decoder algorithm is as follows for a sequence of length N:
Get Decoder initial hidden state hs[N]: Just use encoder final hidden state.
Reconstruct last element in the sequence: x[N]= w.dot(hs[N]) + b.
Same pattern for other elements: x[i]= w.dot(hs[i]) + b
use x[i] and hs[i] as inputs to LSTMCell to get x[i-1] and hs[i-1]
Minimum Working Example:
Here is my implementation, starting with the encoder:
class SeqEncoderLSTM(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, n_features, latent_size):
super(SeqEncoderLSTM, self).__init__()
self.lstm = nn.LSTM(
n_features,
latent_size,
batch_first=True)
def forward(self, x):
_, hs = self.lstm(x)
return hs
Decoder class:
class SeqDecoderLSTM(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, emb_size, n_features):
super(SeqDecoderLSTM, self).__init__()
self.cell = nn.LSTMCell(n_features, emb_size)
self.dense = nn.Linear(emb_size, n_features)
def forward(self, hs_0, seq_len):
x = torch.tensor([])
# Final hidden and cell state from encoder
hs_i, cs_i = hs_0
# reconstruct first element with encoder output
x_i = self.dense(hs_i)
x = torch.cat([x, x_i])
# reconstruct remaining elements
for i in range(1, seq_len):
hs_i, cs_i = self.cell(x_i, (hs_i, cs_i))
x_i = self.dense(hs_i)
x = torch.cat([x, x_i])
return x
Bringing the two together:
class LSTMEncoderDecoder(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, n_features, emb_size):
super(LSTMEncoderDecoder, self).__init__()
self.n_features = n_features
self.hidden_size = emb_size
self.encoder = SeqEncoderLSTM(n_features, emb_size)
self.decoder = SeqDecoderLSTM(emb_size, n_features)
def forward(self, x):
seq_len = x.shape[1]
hs = self.encoder(x)
hs = tuple([h.squeeze(0) for h in hs])
out = self.decoder(hs, seq_len)
return out.unsqueeze(0)
And here's my training function:
def train_encoder(model, epochs, trainload, testload=None, criterion=nn.MSELoss(), optimizer=optim.Adam, lr=1e-6, reverse=False):
device = 'cuda' if torch.cuda.is_available() else 'cpu'
print(f'Training model on {device}')
model = model.to(device)
opt = optimizer(model.parameters(), lr)
train_loss = []
valid_loss = []
for e in tqdm(range(epochs)):
running_tl = 0
running_vl = 0
for x in trainload:
x = x.to(device).float()
opt.zero_grad()
x_hat = model(x)
if reverse:
x = torch.flip(x, [1])
loss = criterion(x_hat, x)
loss.backward()
opt.step()
running_tl += loss.item()
if testload is not None:
model.eval()
with torch.no_grad():
for x in testload:
x = x.to(device).float()
loss = criterion(model(x), x)
running_vl += loss.item()
valid_loss.append(running_vl / len(testload))
model.train()
train_loss.append(running_tl / len(trainload))
return train_loss, valid_loss
Data:
Large dataset of events scraped from the news (ICEWS). Various categories exist that describe each event. I initially one-hot encoded these variables, expanding the data to 274 dimensions. However, in order to debug the model, I've cut it down to a single sequence that is 14 timesteps long and only contains 5 variables. Here is the sequence I'm trying to overfit:
tensor([[0.5122, 0.0360, 0.7027, 0.0721, 0.1892],
[0.5177, 0.0833, 0.6574, 0.1204, 0.1389],
[0.4643, 0.0364, 0.6242, 0.1576, 0.1818],
[0.4375, 0.0133, 0.5733, 0.1867, 0.2267],
[0.4838, 0.0625, 0.6042, 0.1771, 0.1562],
[0.4804, 0.0175, 0.6798, 0.1053, 0.1974],
[0.5030, 0.0445, 0.6712, 0.1438, 0.1404],
[0.4987, 0.0490, 0.6699, 0.1536, 0.1275],
[0.4898, 0.0388, 0.6704, 0.1330, 0.1579],
[0.4711, 0.0390, 0.5877, 0.1532, 0.2201],
[0.4627, 0.0484, 0.5269, 0.1882, 0.2366],
[0.5043, 0.0807, 0.6646, 0.1429, 0.1118],
[0.4852, 0.0606, 0.6364, 0.1515, 0.1515],
[0.5279, 0.0629, 0.6886, 0.1514, 0.0971]], dtype=torch.float64)
And here is the custom Dataset class:
class TimeseriesDataSet(Dataset):
def __init__(self, data, window, n_features, overlap=0):
super().__init__()
if isinstance(data, (np.ndarray)):
data = torch.tensor(data)
elif isinstance(data, (pd.Series, pd.DataFrame)):
data = torch.tensor(data.copy().to_numpy())
else:
raise TypeError(f"Data should be ndarray, series or dataframe. Found {type(data)}.")
self.n_features = n_features
self.seqs = torch.split(data, window)
def __len__(self):
return len(self.seqs)
def __getitem__(self, idx):
try:
return self.seqs[idx].view(-1, self.n_features)
except TypeError:
raise TypeError("Dataset only accepts integer index/slices, not lists/arrays.")
Problem:
The model only learns the average, no matter how complex I make the model or now long I train it.
Predicted/Reconstruction:
Actual:
My research:
This problem is identical to the one discussed in this question: LSTM autoencoder always returns the average of the input sequence
The problem in that case ended up being that the objective function was averaging the target timeseries before calculating loss. This was due to some broadcasting errors because the author didn't have the right sized inputs to the objective function.
In my case, I do not see this being the issue. I have checked and double checked that all of my dimensions/sizes line up. I am at a loss.
Other Things I've Tried
I've tried this with varied sequence lengths from 7 timesteps to 100 time steps.
I've tried with varied number of variables in the time series. I've tried with univariate all the way to all 274 variables that the data contains.
I've tried with various reduction parameters on the nn.MSELoss module. The paper calls for sum, but I've tried both sum and mean. No difference.
The paper calls for reconstructing the sequence in reverse order (see graphic above). I have tried this method using the flipud on the original input (after training but before calculating loss). This makes no difference.
I tried making the model more complex by adding an extra LSTM layer in the encoder.
I've tried playing with the latent space. I've tried from 50% of the input number of features to 150%.
I've tried overfitting a single sequence (provided in the Data section above).
Question:
What is causing my model to predict the average and how do I fix it?

Okay, after some debugging I think I know the reasons.
TLDR
You try to predict next timestep value instead of difference between current timestep and the previous one
Your hidden_features number is too small making the model unable to fit even a single sample
Analysis
Code used
Let's start with the code (model is the same):
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
def get_data(subtract: bool = False):
# (1, 14, 5)
input_tensor = torch.tensor(
[
[0.5122, 0.0360, 0.7027, 0.0721, 0.1892],
[0.5177, 0.0833, 0.6574, 0.1204, 0.1389],
[0.4643, 0.0364, 0.6242, 0.1576, 0.1818],
[0.4375, 0.0133, 0.5733, 0.1867, 0.2267],
[0.4838, 0.0625, 0.6042, 0.1771, 0.1562],
[0.4804, 0.0175, 0.6798, 0.1053, 0.1974],
[0.5030, 0.0445, 0.6712, 0.1438, 0.1404],
[0.4987, 0.0490, 0.6699, 0.1536, 0.1275],
[0.4898, 0.0388, 0.6704, 0.1330, 0.1579],
[0.4711, 0.0390, 0.5877, 0.1532, 0.2201],
[0.4627, 0.0484, 0.5269, 0.1882, 0.2366],
[0.5043, 0.0807, 0.6646, 0.1429, 0.1118],
[0.4852, 0.0606, 0.6364, 0.1515, 0.1515],
[0.5279, 0.0629, 0.6886, 0.1514, 0.0971],
]
).unsqueeze(0)
if subtract:
initial_values = input_tensor[:, 0, :]
input_tensor -= torch.roll(input_tensor, 1, 1)
input_tensor[:, 0, :] = initial_values
return input_tensor
if __name__ == "__main__":
torch.manual_seed(0)
HIDDEN_SIZE = 10
SUBTRACT = False
input_tensor = get_data(SUBTRACT)
model = LSTMEncoderDecoder(input_tensor.shape[-1], HIDDEN_SIZE)
optimizer = torch.optim.Adam(model.parameters())
criterion = torch.nn.MSELoss()
for i in range(1000):
outputs = model(input_tensor)
loss = criterion(outputs, input_tensor)
loss.backward()
optimizer.step()
optimizer.zero_grad()
print(f"{i}: {loss}")
if loss < 1e-4:
break
# Plotting
sns.lineplot(data=outputs.detach().numpy().squeeze())
sns.lineplot(data=input_tensor.detach().numpy().squeeze())
plt.show()
What it does:
get_data either works on the data your provided if subtract=False or (if subtract=True) it subtracts value of the previous timestep from the current timestep
Rest of the code optimizes the model until 1e-4 loss reached (so we can compare how model's capacity and it's increase helps and what happens when we use the difference of timesteps instead of timesteps)
We will only vary HIDDEN_SIZE and SUBTRACT parameters!
NO SUBTRACT, SMALL MODEL
HIDDEN_SIZE=5
SUBTRACT=False
In this case we get a straight line. Model is unable to fit and grasp the phenomena presented in the data (hence flat lines you mentioned).
1000 iterations limit reached
SUBTRACT, SMALL MODEL
HIDDEN_SIZE=5
SUBTRACT=True
Targets are now far from flat lines, but model is unable to fit due to too small capacity.
1000 iterations limit reached
NO SUBTRACT, LARGER MODEL
HIDDEN_SIZE=100
SUBTRACT=False
It got a lot better and our target was hit after 942 steps. No more flat lines, model capacity seems quite fine (for this single example!)
SUBTRACT, LARGER MODEL
HIDDEN_SIZE=100
SUBTRACT=True
Although the graph does not look that pretty, we got to desired loss after only 215 iterations.
Finally
Usually use difference of timesteps instead of timesteps (or some other transformation, see here for more info about that). In other cases, neural network will try to simply... copy output from the previous step (as that's the easiest thing to do). Some minima will be found this way and going out of it will require more capacity.
When you use the difference between timesteps there is no way to "extrapolate" the trend from previous timestep; neural network has to learn how the function actually varies
Use larger model (for the whole dataset you should try something like 300 I think), but you can simply tune that one.
Don't use flipud. Use bidirectional LSTMs, in this way you can get info from forward and backward pass of LSTM (not to confuse with backprop!). This also should boost your score
Questions
Okay, question 1: You are saying that for variable x in the time
series, I should train the model to learn x[i] - x[i-1] rather than
the value of x[i]? Am I correctly interpreting?
Yes, exactly. Difference removes the urge of the neural network to base it's predictions on the past timestep too much (by simply getting last value and maybe changing it a little)
Question 2: You said my calculations for zero bottleneck were
incorrect. But, for example, let's say I'm using a simple dense
network as an auto encoder. Getting the right bottleneck indeed
depends on the data. But if you make the bottleneck the same size as
the input, you get the identity function.
Yes, assuming that there is no non-linearity involved which makes the thing harder (see here for similar case). In case of LSTMs there are non-linearites, that's one point.
Another one is that we are accumulating timesteps into single encoder state. So essentially we would have to accumulate timesteps identities into a single hidden and cell states which is highly unlikely.
One last point, depending on the length of sequence, LSTMs are prone to forgetting some of the least relevant information (that's what they were designed to do, not only to remember everything), hence even more unlikely.
Is num_features * num_timesteps not a bottle neck of the same size as
the input, and therefore shouldn't it facilitate the model learning
the identity?
It is, but it assumes you have num_timesteps for each data point, which is rarely the case, might be here. About the identity and why it is hard to do with non-linearities for the network it was answered above.
One last point, about identity functions; if they were actually easy to learn, ResNets architectures would be unlikely to succeed. Network could converge to identity and make "small fixes" to the output without it, which is not the case.
I'm curious about the statement : "always use difference of timesteps
instead of timesteps" It seem to have some normalizing effect by
bringing all the features closer together but I don't understand why
this is key ? Having a larger model seemed to be the solution and the
substract is just helping.
Key here was, indeed, increasing model capacity. Subtraction trick depends on the data really. Let's imagine an extreme situation:
We have 100 timesteps, single feature
Initial timestep value is 10000
Other timestep values vary by 1 at most
What the neural network would do (what is the easiest here)? It would, probably, discard this 1 or smaller change as noise and just predict 1000 for all of them (especially if some regularization is in place), as being off by 1/1000 is not much.
What if we subtract? Whole neural network loss is in the [0, 1] margin for each timestep instead of [0, 1001], hence it is more severe to be wrong.
And yes, it is connected to normalization in some sense come to think about it.

Related

Finding patterns in time series with PyTorch

I started PyTorch with image recognition. Now I want to test (very basically) with pure NumPy arrays. I struggle with getting the setup to work, so basically I have vectors with values between 0 and 1 (normalized curves). Those vectors are always of length 1500 and I want to find e.g. "high values at the beginning" or "sine wave-like function", "convex", "concave" etc. stuff like that, so just shapes of those curves.
My training set consists of many vectors with their classes; I have chosen 7 classes. The net should be trained to classify a vector into one or more of those 7 classes (not one hot).
I'm struggling with multiple issues, but first my very basic Net
class Net(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, input_dim, hidden_dim, layer_dim, output_dim):
super(Net, self).__init__()
self.hidden_dim = hidden_dim
self.layer_dim = layer_dim
self.rnn = nn.RNN(input_dim, hidden_dim, layer_dim)
self.fc = nn.Linear(self.hidden_dim, output_dim)
def forward(self, x):
h0 = torch.zeros(self.layer_dim, x.size(1), self.hidden_dim).requires_grad_()
out, h0 = self.rnn(x, h0.detach())
out = out[:, -1, :]
out = self.fc(out)
return out
network = Net(1500, 70, 20, 7)
optimizer = optim.SGD(network.parameters(), lr=learning_rate, momentum=momentum)
This is just a copy-paste from an RNN demo. Here is my first issue. Is an RNN the right choice? It is a time series, but then again it is an image recognition problem when plotting the curve.
Now, this here is an attempt to batch the data. The data object contains all training curves together with the correct classifiers.
def train(epoch):
network.train()
network.float()
batching = True
index = 0
# monitor the cummulative loss for an epoch
cummloss = []
# start batching some curves
while batching:
optimizer.zero_grad()
# here I start clustering come curves to a batch and normalize the curves
_input = []
batch_size = min(len(data)-1, index+batch_size_train) - index
for d in data[index:min(len(data)-1, index+batch_size_train)]:
y = np.array(d['data']['y'], dtype='d')
y = np.multiply(y, y.max())
y = y[0:1500]
y = np.pad(y, (0, max(1500-len(y), 0)), 'edge')
if len(_input) == 0:
_input = y
else:
_input = np.vstack((_input, y))
input = torch.from_numpy(_input).float()
input = torch.reshape(input, (1, batch_size, len(y)))
target = np.zeros((1,7))
# the correct classes have indizes, to I create a vector with 1 at the correct locations
for _index in np.array(d['classifier']):
target[0,_index-1] = 1
target = torch.from_numpy(target)
# get the result form the network
output = network(input)
# is this a good loss function?
loss = F.l1_loss(output, target)
loss.backward()
cummloss.append(loss.item())
optimizer.step()
index = index + batch_size_train
if index > len(data):
print(np.mean(cummloss))
batching = False
for e in range(1, n_epochs):
print('Epoch: ' + str(e))
train(0)
The problem I'm facing right now is, the loss doesn't change very little, even with hundreds of epochs.
Are there existing examples of this kind of problem? I didn't find any, just pure png/jpg image recognition. When I convert the curves to png then I have a little issue to train a net, I took densenet and it worked just fine but it seems to be super overkill for this simple task.
This is just a copy-paste from an RNN demo. Here is my first issue. Is an RNN the right choice?
In theory what model you choose does not matter as much as "How" you formulate your problem.
But in your case the most obvious limitation you're going to face is your sequence length: 1500. RNN store information across steps and typically runs into trouble over long sequence with vanishing or exploding gradient.
LSTM net have been developed to circumvent this limitations with memory cell, but even then in the case of long sequence it will still be limited by the amount of information stored in the cell.
You could try using a CNN network as well and think of it as an image.
Are there existing examples of this kind of problem?
I don't know but I might have some suggestions : If I understood your problem correctly, you're going from a (1500, 1) input to a (7,1) output, where 6 of the 7 positions are 0 except for the corresponding class where it's 1.
I don't see any activation function, usually when dealing with multi class you don't use the output of the dense layer to compute the loss you apply a normalizing function like softmax and then you can compute the loss.
From your description of features you have in the form of sin like structures, the closes thing that comes to mind is frequency domain. As such, if you have and input image, just transform it to the frequency domain by a Fourier transform and use that as your feature input.
Might be best to look for such projects on the internet, one such project that you might want to read the research paper or video from this group (they have some jupyter notebooks for you to try) or any similar works. They use the furrier features, that go though a multi layer perceptron (MLP).
I am not sure what exactly you want to do, but seems like a classification task, you would use RNN if you want your neural network to work with a sequence. To me it seems like the 1500 dimensions are independent, and as such can be just treated as input.
Regarding the last layer, for a classification problem it usually is a probability distribution obtained by applying softmax (if only the classification is distinct - i.e. probability sums up to 1), in which, given an input, the net gives a probability of it being from each class. If we are predicting multiple classes we are going to use sigmoid as the last layer of the neural network.
Regarding your loss, there are many losses you can try and see if they are better. Once again, for different features you have to know what exactly is the measurement of distance (a.k.a. how different 2 things are). Check out this website, or just any loss function explanations on the net.
So you should try a simple MLP on top of fourier features as a starting point, assuming that is your feature vector.
Image Recognition is different from Time-Series data. In the imaging domain your data-set might have more similarity with problems like Activity-Recognition, Video-Recognition which have temporal component. So, I'd recommend looking into some models for those.
As for the current model, I'd recommend using LSTM instead of RNN. And also for classification you need to use an activation function in your final layer. This should softmax with cross entropy based loss or sigmoid with MSE loss.
Keras has a Timedistributed model which makes it easy to handle time components. You can use a similar approach with Pytorch by applying linear layers followed by LSTM.
Look into these for better undertsanding ::
Activity Recognition : https://www.narayanacharya.com/vision/2019-12-30-Action-Recognition-Using-LSTM
https://discuss.pytorch.org/t/any-pytorch-function-can-work-as-keras-timedistributed/1346
How to implement time-distributed dense (TDD) layer in PyTorch
Activation Function ::
https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.nn.Softmax.html

Neural network versus random forest performance discrepancy

I want to run some experiments with neural networks using PyTorch, so I tried a simple one as a warm-up exercise, and I cannot quite make sense of the results.
The exercise attempts to predict the rating of 1000 TPTP problems from various statistics about the problems such as number of variables, maximum clause length etc. Data file https://github.com/russellw/ml/blob/master/test.csv is quite straightforward, 1000 rows, the final column is the rating, started off with some tens of input columns, with all the numbers scaled to the range 0-1, I progressively deleted features to see if the result still held, and it does, all the way down to one input column; the others are in previous versions in Git history.
I started off using separate training and test sets, but have set aside the test set for the moment, because the question about whether training performance generalizes to testing, doesn't arise until training performance has been obtained in the first place.
Simple linear regression on this data set has a mean squared error of about 0.14.
I implemented a simple feedforward neural network, code in https://github.com/russellw/ml/blob/master/test_nn.py and copied below, that after a couple hundred training epochs, also has an mean squared error of 0.14.
So I tried changing the number of hidden layers from 1 to 2 to 3, using a few different optimizers, tweaking the learning rate, switching the activation functions from relu to tanh to a mixture of both, increasing the number of epochs to 5000, increasing the number of hidden units to 1000. At this point, it should easily have had the ability to just memorize the entire data set. (At this point I'm not concerned about overfitting. I'm just trying to get the mean squared error on training data to be something other than 0.14.) Nothing made any difference. Still 0.14. I would say it must be stuck in a local optimum, but that's not supposed to happen when you've got a couple million weights; it's supposed to be practically impossible to be in a local optimum for all parameters simultaneously. And I do get slightly different sequences of numbers on each run. But it always converges to 0.14.
Now the obvious conclusion would be that 0.14 is as good as it gets for this problem, except that it stays the same even when the network has enough memory to just memorize all the data. But the clincher is that I also tried a random forest, https://github.com/russellw/ml/blob/master/test_rf.py
... and the random forest has a mean squared error of 0.01 on the original data set, degrading gracefully as features are deleted, still 0.05 on the data with just one feature.
Nowhere in the lore of machine learning is it said 'random forests vastly outperform neural nets', so I'm presumably doing something wrong, but I can't see what it is. Maybe it's something as simple as just missing a flag or something you need to set in PyTorch. I would appreciate it if someone could take a look.
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import torch
import torch.nn as nn
# data
df = pd.read_csv("test.csv")
print(df)
print()
# separate the output column
y_name = df.columns[-1]
y_df = df[y_name]
X_df = df.drop(y_name, axis=1)
# numpy arrays
X_ar = np.array(X_df, dtype=np.float32)
y_ar = np.array(y_df, dtype=np.float32)
# torch tensors
X_tensor = torch.from_numpy(X_ar)
y_tensor = torch.from_numpy(y_ar)
# hyperparameters
in_features = X_ar.shape[1]
hidden_size = 100
out_features = 1
epochs = 500
# model
class Net(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, hidden_size):
super(Net, self).__init__()
self.L0 = nn.Linear(in_features, hidden_size)
self.N0 = nn.ReLU()
self.L1 = nn.Linear(hidden_size, hidden_size)
self.N1 = nn.Tanh()
self.L2 = nn.Linear(hidden_size, hidden_size)
self.N2 = nn.ReLU()
self.L3 = nn.Linear(hidden_size, 1)
def forward(self, x):
x = self.L0(x)
x = self.N0(x)
x = self.L1(x)
x = self.N1(x)
x = self.L2(x)
x = self.N2(x)
x = self.L3(x)
return x
model = Net(hidden_size)
criterion = nn.MSELoss()
optimizer = torch.optim.Adam(model.parameters(), lr=0.1)
# train
print("training")
for epoch in range(1, epochs + 1):
# forward
output = model(X_tensor)
cost = criterion(output, y_tensor)
# backward
optimizer.zero_grad()
cost.backward()
optimizer.step()
# print progress
if epoch % (epochs // 10) == 0:
print(f"{epoch:6d} {cost.item():10f}")
print()
output = model(X_tensor)
cost = criterion(output, y_tensor)
print("mean squared error:", cost.item())
can you please print the shape of your input ?
I would say check those things first:
that your target y have the shape (-1, 1) I don't know if pytorch throws an Error in this case. you can use y.reshape(-1, 1) if it isn't 2 dim
your learning rate is high. usually when using Adam the default value is good enough or try simply to lower your learning rate. 0.1 is a high value for a learning rate to start with
place the optimizer.zero_grad at the first line inside the for loop
normalize/standardize your data ( this is usually good for NNs )
remove outliers in your data (my opinion: I think this can't affect Random forest so much but it can affect NNs badly)
use cross validation (maybe skorch can help you here. It's a scikit learn wrapper for pytorch and easy to use if you know keras)
Notice that Random forest regressor or any other regressor can outperform neural nets in some cases. There is some fields where neural nets are the heros like Image Classification or NLP but you need to be aware that a simple regression algorithm can outperform them. Usually when your data is not big enough.

Recreating char level RNN for generating text

I tied to follow a book on deep learning, where there is an chapter about generating text in the style of an example. They used an char level RNN with two LSTM layers in it to generate text in the style of shakespare. But the code in the book (also online: https://github.com/DOsinga/deep_learning_cookbook/blob/master/05.1%20Generating%20Text%20in%20the%20Style%20of%20an%20Example%20Text.ipynb) is written in keras and I only use pytorch. So i tied to recreate it exactly in pytorch, with same network structure and hyperparameters.
So after recreating it and making it work without errors it trained it and it only learned to write the most common character, a space. Then i tried to overfit it on one realy simple sentence, so I had to decrease the sequence lenght to 8. This also did not work, but when decreasing the hidden size of the LSTMs to only 32 it learned it nearly perfectly.
So then I continued working on the original text and started to play arround with the hidden size, learning rate, optimizer (also tried adam) and trained it even longer. The best I could achieve were some random letters, still with a lot of spaces and somtimes something like "her", but far from readable, with still an quite high loss. I used RMSprop with lr=0.01 and a hidden size of 128 over 20000 epochs. I also tried to initialize the hidden state and cell state to zero.
The problem is, that my results are far worse than those in the book, but I did exactly the same just in pytorch. Can someone please tell me, what I should try or what I have done wrong. Any help is appreciated!
PS: Sorry for my bad english.
Here is my code with the original hyperparameters:
#hyperparameters
batch_size = 256
seq_len = 160
hidden_size = 640
layers = 2
#network structure
class RNN(nn.Module):
def __init__(self):
super().__init__()
self.lstm = nn.LSTM(len(chars),hidden_size,layers)
self.linear = nn.Linear(hidden_size,len(chars))
self.softmax = nn.Softmax(dim=2)
def forward(self,x,h,c):
x,(h,c) = self.lstm(x,(h,c))
x = self.softmax(self.linear(x))
return x,h,c
#create network, optimizer and criterion
rnn = RNN().cuda()
optimizer = torch.optim.RMSprop(rnn.parameters(),lr=0.01)
criterion = nn.CrossEntropyLoss()
#training loop
plt.ion()
losses = []
loss_sum = 0
for epoch in range(10000):
#generate input and target filled with zeros
input = numpy.zeros((seq_len,batch_size,len(chars)))
target = numpy.zeros((seq_len,batch_size))
for batch in range(batch_size):
#choose random starting index in text
start = random.randrange(len(text)-seq_len-1)
#generate sequences for that batch filled with zeros
input_seq = numpy.zeros((seq_len+1,len(chars)))
target_seq = numpy.zeros((seq_len+1))
for i,char in enumerate(text[start:start+seq_len+1]):
#convert character to index
idx = char_to_idx[char]
#set value of index to one (one-hot-encoding)
input_seq[i,idx] = 1
#set value to index (only label)
target_seq[i] = idx
#insert sequences into input and target
input[:,batch,:] = input_seq[:-1]
target[:,batch] = target_seq[1:]
#convert input and target from numpy array to pytorch tensor on gpu
input = torch.from_numpy(input).float().cuda()
target = torch.from_numpy(target).long().cuda()
#initialize hidden state and cell state to zero
h0 = torch.zeros(layers,batch_size,hidden_size).cuda()
c0 = torch.zeros(layers,batch_size,hidden_size).cuda()
#run the network on the input
output,h,c = rnn(input,h0,c0)
#calculate loss and perform gradient descent
optimizer.zero_grad()
loss = criterion(output.view(-1,len(chars)),target.view(-1))
loss.backward()
optimizer.step()
Plot of the loss with original hyperparameters:
Example of target and output after training:
Target: can bring this instrument of honour
again into his native quarter, be magnanimous in the enterprise,
and go on; I will grace the attempt for a worthy e
Output:
Plot of the loss with hidden size of 128 over 20000 epochs (best results):
I later finally found a way to achive something close to real sentences, maybe it will help someone. Here is an example result:
-I have not seen him and the prince was a signt of the streme of the sumpering of the property of th
In my case the important change was to not inizialize the hidden and cell state to zero every batch but only every epoch. For this to work I had to rewrite the batch generator, so that it produces batches following on each other.

PyTorch Binary Classification - same network structure, 'simpler' data, but worse performance?

To get to grips with PyTorch (and deep learning in general) I started by working through some basic classification examples. One such example was classifying a non-linear dataset created using sklearn (full code available as notebook here)
n_pts = 500
X, y = datasets.make_circles(n_samples=n_pts, random_state=123, noise=0.1, factor=0.2)
x_data = torch.FloatTensor(X)
y_data = torch.FloatTensor(y.reshape(500, 1))
This is then accurately classified using a pretty basic neural net
class Model(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, input_size, H1, output_size):
super().__init__()
self.linear = nn.Linear(input_size, H1)
self.linear2 = nn.Linear(H1, output_size)
def forward(self, x):
x = torch.sigmoid(self.linear(x))
x = torch.sigmoid(self.linear2(x))
return x
def predict(self, x):
pred = self.forward(x)
if pred >= 0.5:
return 1
else:
return 0
As I have an interest in health data I then decided to try and use the same network structure to classify some a basic real-world dataset. I took heart rate data for one patient from here, and altered it so all values > 91 would be labelled as anomalies (e.g. a 1 and everything <= 91 labelled a 0). This is completely arbitrary, but I just wanted to see how the classification would work. The complete notebook for this example is here.
What is not intuitive to me is why the first example reaches a loss of 0.0016 after 1,000 epochs, whereas the second example only reaches a loss of 0.4296 after 10,000 epochs
Perhaps I am being naive in thinking that the heart rate example would be much easier to classify. Any insights to help me understand why this is not what I am seeing would be great!
TL;DR
Your input data is not normalized.
use x_data = (x_data - x_data.mean()) / x_data.std()
increase the learning rate optimizer = torch.optim.Adam(model.parameters(), lr=0.01)
You'll get
convergence in only 1000 iterations.
More details
The key difference between the two examples you have is that the data x in the first example is centered around (0, 0) and has very low variance.
On the other hand, the data in the second example is centered around 92 and has relatively large variance.
This initial bias in the data is not taken into account when you randomly initialize the weights which is done based on the assumption that the inputs are roughly normally distributed around zero.
It is almost impossible for the optimization process to compensate for this gross deviation - thus the model gets stuck in a sub-optimal solution.
Once you normalize the inputs, by subtracting the mean and dividing by the std, the optimization process becomes stable again and rapidly converges to a good solution.
For more details about input normalization and weights initialization, you can read section 2.2 in He et al Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification (ICCV 2015).
What if I cannot normalize the data?
If, for some reason, you cannot compute mean and std data in advance, you can still use nn.BatchNorm1d to estimate and normalize the data as part of the training process. For example
class Model(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, input_size, H1, output_size):
super().__init__()
self.bn = nn.BatchNorm1d(input_size) # adding batchnorm
self.linear = nn.Linear(input_size, H1)
self.linear2 = nn.Linear(H1, output_size)
def forward(self, x):
x = torch.sigmoid(self.linear(self.bn(x))) # batchnorm the input x
x = torch.sigmoid(self.linear2(x))
return x
This modification without any change to the input data, yields similar convergance after only 1000 epochs:
A minor comment
For numerical stability, it is better to use nn.BCEWithLogitsLoss instead of nn.BCELoss. For this end, you need to remove the torch.sigmoid from the forward() output, the sigmoid will be computed inside the loss.
See, for example, this thread regarding the related sigmoid + cross entropy loss for binary predictions.
Let's start first by understanding how neural networks work, neural networks observe patterns, hence the necessity for large datasets. In the case of the example, two what pattern you intend to find is when if HR < 91: label = 0, this if-condition can be represented by the formula, sigmoid((HR-91) * 1) , if you plug various values into the formula you can see you that all values < 91, label 0 and others label 1. I have inferred this formula and it could be anything as long as it gives the correct values.
Basically, we apply the formula wx+b, where x in our input data and we learn the values for w and b. Now initially the values are all random, so getting the b value from 1030131190 (a random value), to maybe 98 is fast, since the loss is great, the learning rate allows the values to jump fast. But once you reach 98, your loss is decreasing, and when you apply the learning rate, it takes it more time to reach closer to 91, hence the slow decrease in loss. As the values get closer, the steps taken are even slower.
This can be confirmed via the loss values, they are constantly decreasing, initially, the deceleration is higher, but then it becomes smaller. Your network is still learning but slowly.
Hence in deep learning, you use this method called stepped learning rate, wherewith the increase in epochs you decrease your learning rate so that your learning is faster

Understanding Keras LSTMs

I am trying to reconcile my understand of LSTMs and pointed out here in this post by Christopher Olah implemented in Keras. I am following the blog written by Jason Brownlee for the Keras tutorial. What I am mainly confused about is,
The reshaping of the data series into [samples, time steps, features] and,
The stateful LSTMs
Lets concentrate on the above two questions with reference to the code pasted below:
# reshape into X=t and Y=t+1
look_back = 3
trainX, trainY = create_dataset(train, look_back)
testX, testY = create_dataset(test, look_back)
# reshape input to be [samples, time steps, features]
trainX = numpy.reshape(trainX, (trainX.shape[0], look_back, 1))
testX = numpy.reshape(testX, (testX.shape[0], look_back, 1))
########################
# The IMPORTANT BIT
##########################
# create and fit the LSTM network
batch_size = 1
model = Sequential()
model.add(LSTM(4, batch_input_shape=(batch_size, look_back, 1), stateful=True))
model.add(Dense(1))
model.compile(loss='mean_squared_error', optimizer='adam')
for i in range(100):
model.fit(trainX, trainY, nb_epoch=1, batch_size=batch_size, verbose=2, shuffle=False)
model.reset_states()
Note: create_dataset takes a sequence of length N and returns a N-look_back array of which each element is a look_back length sequence.
What is Time Steps and Features?
As can be seen TrainX is a 3-D array with Time_steps and Feature being the last two dimensions respectively (3 and 1 in this particular code). With respect to the image below, does this mean that we are considering the many to one case, where the number of pink boxes are 3? Or does it literally mean the chain length is 3 (i.e. only 3 green boxes considered).
Does the features argument become relevant when we consider multivariate series? e.g. modelling two financial stocks simultaneously?
Stateful LSTMs
Does stateful LSTMs mean that we save the cell memory values between runs of batches? If this is the case, batch_size is one, and the memory is reset between the training runs so what was the point of saying that it was stateful. I'm guessing this is related to the fact that training data is not shuffled, but I'm not sure how.
Any thoughts?
Image reference: http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
Edit 1:
A bit confused about #van's comment about the red and green boxes being equal. So just to confirm, does the following API calls correspond to the unrolled diagrams? Especially noting the second diagram (batch_size was arbitrarily chosen.):
Edit 2:
For people who have done Udacity's deep learning course and still confused about the time_step argument, look at the following discussion: https://discussions.udacity.com/t/rnn-lstm-use-implementation/163169
Update:
It turns out model.add(TimeDistributed(Dense(vocab_len))) was what I was looking for. Here is an example: https://github.com/sachinruk/ShakespeareBot
Update2:
I have summarised most of my understanding of LSTMs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywinX5wgdEU
As a complement to the accepted answer, this answer shows keras behaviors and how to achieve each picture.
General Keras behavior
The standard keras internal processing is always a many to many as in the following picture (where I used features=2, pressure and temperature, just as an example):
In this image, I increased the number of steps to 5, to avoid confusion with the other dimensions.
For this example:
We have N oil tanks
We spent 5 hours taking measures hourly (time steps)
We measured two features:
Pressure P
Temperature T
Our input array should then be something shaped as (N,5,2):
[ Step1 Step2 Step3 Step4 Step5
Tank A: [[Pa1,Ta1], [Pa2,Ta2], [Pa3,Ta3], [Pa4,Ta4], [Pa5,Ta5]],
Tank B: [[Pb1,Tb1], [Pb2,Tb2], [Pb3,Tb3], [Pb4,Tb4], [Pb5,Tb5]],
....
Tank N: [[Pn1,Tn1], [Pn2,Tn2], [Pn3,Tn3], [Pn4,Tn4], [Pn5,Tn5]],
]
Inputs for sliding windows
Often, LSTM layers are supposed to process the entire sequences. Dividing windows may not be the best idea. The layer has internal states about how a sequence is evolving as it steps forward. Windows eliminate the possibility of learning long sequences, limiting all sequences to the window size.
In windows, each window is part of a long original sequence, but by Keras they will be seen each as an independent sequence:
[ Step1 Step2 Step3 Step4 Step5
Window A: [[P1,T1], [P2,T2], [P3,T3], [P4,T4], [P5,T5]],
Window B: [[P2,T2], [P3,T3], [P4,T4], [P5,T5], [P6,T6]],
Window C: [[P3,T3], [P4,T4], [P5,T5], [P6,T6], [P7,T7]],
....
]
Notice that in this case, you have initially only one sequence, but you're dividing it in many sequences to create windows.
The concept of "what is a sequence" is abstract. The important parts are:
you can have batches with many individual sequences
what makes the sequences be sequences is that they evolve in steps (usually time steps)
Achieving each case with "single layers"
Achieving standard many to many:
You can achieve many to many with a simple LSTM layer, using return_sequences=True:
outputs = LSTM(units, return_sequences=True)(inputs)
#output_shape -> (batch_size, steps, units)
Achieving many to one:
Using the exact same layer, keras will do the exact same internal preprocessing, but when you use return_sequences=False (or simply ignore this argument), keras will automatically discard the steps previous to the last:
outputs = LSTM(units)(inputs)
#output_shape -> (batch_size, units) --> steps were discarded, only the last was returned
Achieving one to many
Now, this is not supported by keras LSTM layers alone. You will have to create your own strategy to multiplicate the steps. There are two good approaches:
Create a constant multi-step input by repeating a tensor
Use a stateful=True to recurrently take the output of one step and serve it as the input of the next step (needs output_features == input_features)
One to many with repeat vector
In order to fit to keras standard behavior, we need inputs in steps, so, we simply repeat the inputs for the length we want:
outputs = RepeatVector(steps)(inputs) #where inputs is (batch,features)
outputs = LSTM(units,return_sequences=True)(outputs)
#output_shape -> (batch_size, steps, units)
Understanding stateful = True
Now comes one of the possible usages of stateful=True (besides avoiding loading data that can't fit your computer's memory at once)
Stateful allows us to input "parts" of the sequences in stages. The difference is:
In stateful=False, the second batch contains whole new sequences, independent from the first batch
In stateful=True, the second batch continues the first batch, extending the same sequences.
It's like dividing the sequences in windows too, with these two main differences:
these windows do not superpose!!
stateful=True will see these windows connected as a single long sequence
In stateful=True, every new batch will be interpreted as continuing the previous batch (until you call model.reset_states()).
Sequence 1 in batch 2 will continue sequence 1 in batch 1.
Sequence 2 in batch 2 will continue sequence 2 in batch 1.
Sequence n in batch 2 will continue sequence n in batch 1.
Example of inputs, batch 1 contains steps 1 and 2, batch 2 contains steps 3 to 5:
BATCH 1 BATCH 2
[ Step1 Step2 | [ Step3 Step4 Step5
Tank A: [[Pa1,Ta1], [Pa2,Ta2], | [Pa3,Ta3], [Pa4,Ta4], [Pa5,Ta5]],
Tank B: [[Pb1,Tb1], [Pb2,Tb2], | [Pb3,Tb3], [Pb4,Tb4], [Pb5,Tb5]],
.... |
Tank N: [[Pn1,Tn1], [Pn2,Tn2], | [Pn3,Tn3], [Pn4,Tn4], [Pn5,Tn5]],
] ]
Notice the alignment of tanks in batch 1 and batch 2! That's why we need shuffle=False (unless we are using only one sequence, of course).
You can have any number of batches, indefinitely. (For having variable lengths in each batch, use input_shape=(None,features).
One to many with stateful=True
For our case here, we are going to use only 1 step per batch, because we want to get one output step and make it be an input.
Please notice that the behavior in the picture is not "caused by" stateful=True. We will force that behavior in a manual loop below. In this example, stateful=True is what "allows" us to stop the sequence, manipulate what we want, and continue from where we stopped.
Honestly, the repeat approach is probably a better choice for this case. But since we're looking into stateful=True, this is a good example. The best way to use this is the next "many to many" case.
Layer:
outputs = LSTM(units=features,
stateful=True,
return_sequences=True, #just to keep a nice output shape even with length 1
input_shape=(None,features))(inputs)
#units = features because we want to use the outputs as inputs
#None because we want variable length
#output_shape -> (batch_size, steps, units)
Now, we're going to need a manual loop for predictions:
input_data = someDataWithShape((batch, 1, features))
#important, we're starting new sequences, not continuing old ones:
model.reset_states()
output_sequence = []
last_step = input_data
for i in steps_to_predict:
new_step = model.predict(last_step)
output_sequence.append(new_step)
last_step = new_step
#end of the sequences
model.reset_states()
Many to many with stateful=True
Now, here, we get a very nice application: given an input sequence, try to predict its future unknown steps.
We're using the same method as in the "one to many" above, with the difference that:
we will use the sequence itself to be the target data, one step ahead
we know part of the sequence (so we discard this part of the results).
Layer (same as above):
outputs = LSTM(units=features,
stateful=True,
return_sequences=True,
input_shape=(None,features))(inputs)
#units = features because we want to use the outputs as inputs
#None because we want variable length
#output_shape -> (batch_size, steps, units)
Training:
We are going to train our model to predict the next step of the sequences:
totalSequences = someSequencesShaped((batch, steps, features))
#batch size is usually 1 in these cases (often you have only one Tank in the example)
X = totalSequences[:,:-1] #the entire known sequence, except the last step
Y = totalSequences[:,1:] #one step ahead of X
#loop for resetting states at the start/end of the sequences:
for epoch in range(epochs):
model.reset_states()
model.train_on_batch(X,Y)
Predicting:
The first stage of our predicting involves "ajusting the states". That's why we're going to predict the entire sequence again, even if we already know this part of it:
model.reset_states() #starting a new sequence
predicted = model.predict(totalSequences)
firstNewStep = predicted[:,-1:] #the last step of the predictions is the first future step
Now we go to the loop as in the one to many case. But don't reset states here!. We want the model to know in which step of the sequence it is (and it knows it's at the first new step because of the prediction we just made above)
output_sequence = [firstNewStep]
last_step = firstNewStep
for i in steps_to_predict:
new_step = model.predict(last_step)
output_sequence.append(new_step)
last_step = new_step
#end of the sequences
model.reset_states()
This approach was used in these answers and file:
Predicting a multiple forward time step of a time series using LSTM
how to use the Keras model to forecast for future dates or events?
https://github.com/danmoller/TestRepo/blob/master/TestBookLSTM.ipynb
Achieving complex configurations
In all examples above, I showed the behavior of "one layer".
You can, of course, stack many layers on top of each other, not necessarly all following the same pattern, and create your own models.
One interesting example that has been appearing is the "autoencoder" that has a "many to one encoder" followed by a "one to many" decoder:
Encoder:
inputs = Input((steps,features))
#a few many to many layers:
outputs = LSTM(hidden1,return_sequences=True)(inputs)
outputs = LSTM(hidden2,return_sequences=True)(outputs)
#many to one layer:
outputs = LSTM(hidden3)(outputs)
encoder = Model(inputs,outputs)
Decoder:
Using the "repeat" method;
inputs = Input((hidden3,))
#repeat to make one to many:
outputs = RepeatVector(steps)(inputs)
#a few many to many layers:
outputs = LSTM(hidden4,return_sequences=True)(outputs)
#last layer
outputs = LSTM(features,return_sequences=True)(outputs)
decoder = Model(inputs,outputs)
Autoencoder:
inputs = Input((steps,features))
outputs = encoder(inputs)
outputs = decoder(outputs)
autoencoder = Model(inputs,outputs)
Train with fit(X,X)
Additional explanations
If you want details about how steps are calculated in LSTMs, or details about the stateful=True cases above, you can read more in this answer: Doubts regarding `Understanding Keras LSTMs`
First of all, you choose great tutorials(1,2) to start.
What Time-step means: Time-steps==3 in X.shape (Describing data shape) means there are three pink boxes. Since in Keras each step requires an input, therefore the number of the green boxes should usually equal to the number of red boxes. Unless you hack the structure.
many to many vs. many to one: In keras, there is a return_sequences parameter when your initializing LSTM or GRU or SimpleRNN. When return_sequences is False (by default), then it is many to one as shown in the picture. Its return shape is (batch_size, hidden_unit_length), which represent the last state. When return_sequences is True, then it is many to many. Its return shape is (batch_size, time_step, hidden_unit_length)
Does the features argument become relevant: Feature argument means "How big is your red box" or what is the input dimension each step. If you want to predict from, say, 8 kinds of market information, then you can generate your data with feature==8.
Stateful: You can look up the source code. When initializing the state, if stateful==True, then the state from last training will be used as the initial state, otherwise it will generate a new state. I haven't turn on stateful yet. However, I disagree with that the batch_size can only be 1 when stateful==True.
Currently, you generate your data with collected data. Image your stock information is coming as stream, rather than waiting for a day to collect all sequential, you would like to generate input data online while training/predicting with network. If you have 400 stocks sharing a same network, then you can set batch_size==400.
When you have return_sequences in your last layer of RNN you cannot use a simple Dense layer instead use TimeDistributed.
Here is an example piece of code this might help others.
words = keras.layers.Input(batch_shape=(None, self.maxSequenceLength), name = "input")
# Build a matrix of size vocabularySize x EmbeddingDimension
# where each row corresponds to a "word embedding" vector.
# This layer will convert replace each word-id with a word-vector of size Embedding Dimension.
embeddings = keras.layers.embeddings.Embedding(self.vocabularySize, self.EmbeddingDimension,
name = "embeddings")(words)
# Pass the word-vectors to the LSTM layer.
# We are setting the hidden-state size to 512.
# The output will be batchSize x maxSequenceLength x hiddenStateSize
hiddenStates = keras.layers.GRU(512, return_sequences = True,
input_shape=(self.maxSequenceLength,
self.EmbeddingDimension),
name = "rnn")(embeddings)
hiddenStates2 = keras.layers.GRU(128, return_sequences = True,
input_shape=(self.maxSequenceLength, self.EmbeddingDimension),
name = "rnn2")(hiddenStates)
denseOutput = TimeDistributed(keras.layers.Dense(self.vocabularySize),
name = "linear")(hiddenStates2)
predictions = TimeDistributed(keras.layers.Activation("softmax"),
name = "softmax")(denseOutput)
# Build the computational graph by specifying the input, and output of the network.
model = keras.models.Model(input = words, output = predictions)
# model.compile(loss='kullback_leibler_divergence', \
model.compile(loss='sparse_categorical_crossentropy', \
optimizer = keras.optimizers.Adam(lr=0.009, \
beta_1=0.9,\
beta_2=0.999, \
epsilon=None, \
decay=0.01, \
amsgrad=False))
Refer this blog for more details Animated RNN, LSTM and GRU.
The figure below gives you a better view of LSTM. It's a LSTM cell.
As you can see, X has 3 features (green circles) so input of this cell is a vector of dimension 3 and hidden state has 2 units (red circles) so the output of this cell (and also cell state) is a vector of dimension 2.
An example of one LSTM layer with 3 timesteps (3 LSTM cells) is shown in the figure below:
** A model can have multiple LSTM layers.
Now I use Daniel Möller's example again for better understanding:
We have 10 oil tanks. For each of them we measure 2 features: temperature, pressure every one hour for 5 times.
now parameters are:
batch_size = number of samples used in one forward/backward pass (default=32) --> for example if you have 1000 samples and you set up the batch_size to 100 then the model will take 10 iterations to pass all of the samples once through network (1 epoch). The higher the batch size, the more memory space you'll need. Because the number of samples in this example are low, we consider batch_size equal to all of samples = 10
timesteps = 5
features = 2
units = It's a positive integer and determines the dimension of hidden state and cell state or in other words the number of parameters passed to next LSTM cell. It can be chosen arbitrarily or empirically based on the features and timesteps. Using more units will result in more accuracy and also more computational time. But it may cause over fitting.
input_shape = (batch_size, timesteps, features) = (10,5,2)
output_shape:
(batch_size, timesteps, units) if return_sequences=True
(batch_size, units) if return_sequences=False

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